We spent our honeymoon in Algiers. The time passed all too quickly, since the office was unable to spare me for more than a month. Print shall not profane these sacred memories. It is enough for my readers to know that early in the next year, 1945, I gave up the active part which I had hitherto taken in the management of the business, and became something of a sleeping partner. We took a house in Chiswick, which had the advantage of being a central as well as a fashionable quarter. We bought Greylands, and added to it a little, taking great care, however, not to spoil the character of the house—our needs, indeed, were comparatively simple. Two covered courts, a ferro-concrete drome, and a new smoking-room for my women guests proved, in the end, to be all that was necessary. It was at Greylands that my two sons were born, Francis James, the second and last Lord Porstock, in 1946, and Gervase Linthorpe, who never lived to succeed him, in 1947. But I have, perhaps, spent too much space already in purely domestic chronicles; my readers will be expecting by now some account of the world of London as it was forty years ago. Did I say “the world” of London? Only a very tiny bit of it, I am afraid; for we all live in small worlds, and perhaps in some ways there is none smaller than that which is called “Society.” Yet, for a later generation, it is easy to understand why Society, in this sense, should be of particular interest. For, after all, it is the leisured and the more elaborately differentiated class who reflect most faithfully the fads and the follies of their time. The fads and the follies! I remember bluff old Lord Billericay, when we were having one of those terrifying smart conversations at Edith St. Briavel’s, being called upon to contribute his definition of what one meant by Society; to which the only answer he would give was, “I have no respect for a Society which doesn’t see that Tommy Lieberts is a fool.” And yet, when I look back at the salons of those days, and think how the beauty that thronged them has faded, and the wit and inspiration that then seemed so novel has become flat and insipid, and the serious questions which we discussed have either been platitudinously answered by now or have ceased to be questions at all, I sometimes think the only thing that lives about us is our follies. For these are only the pastime of a moment, and, passing with the moment, they escape by their very briefness of duration the desecrating hand of time. I suppose we were foolish. Manners, language, and even thought had become artificial, as the result of a long spell of European peace and prosperity: I suppose it is always so until a war comes to waken us up to a sense of realities. Let me try and remember, then, some of the charming fools I knew.